Faculty
Michael Arcega
San Francisco-based sculpture and installation artist Michael Arcega is the Art Department’s newest tenure-track faculty member.
“Known—and collected—for punning relentlessly in the face of bigotry and despair, Michael Arcega is a very intelligent, very talented goofball,” SF Weekly wrote in 2008 when he was named Best Artist.
Though visual, Arcega’s art revolves largely around language. Informed by historic events, material significance and the format of jokes, his subject matter deals with sociopolitical circumstances where power relations are unbalanced.
The Philippines native has exhibited his work throughout the U.S., including at SF State’s Fine Arts Gallery. He won a 2012 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Dennis Campbell
Dennis Campbell, History, possesses a profound understanding of the late Bronze Age, the links between language and culture, and history of the ancient Mediterranean extending to Greece and Rome. Enhancing his scholarship, he has developed a mastery of numerous ancient languages: Akkadian, Elamite, Hattian, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, Old Persian, Sumerian and Urartian.
He has served as research administrator of the Persepolis Fortification Archive project, based at University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Campbell has published seven scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, with five more accepted for publication. His monograph Mood and Modality in Hurrian will be published in the series Studies on the Culture and Civilization of Nuzi and the Hurrians.
Campbell earned his Ph.D. in Near Eastern languages and civilizations at University of Chicago.
Christopher Clemens
Christopher Clemens, Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts, recently completed his Ph.D. in communication at University of Connecticut. His dissertation explored “Cultivation Effects of Media on Perceptions of Ideal Masculinity and Identity.” He plans to further study these issues, along with body image and homosexuality, through quantitative research and the development of an original sitcom.
Clemens holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in television production from City University of New York-Brooklyn College. He is teaching Television Directing and Electronic Field Production this fall.
Marcela García-Castañon
Marcela García-Castañon, Political Science, recently her completed her Ph.D. at University of Washington, focusing her dissertation on new theories of immigrant political socialization. She was a Jacob K. Javits fellow, WISER graduate fellow and Simpson Center Borderlands Fellow during her graduate studies. Her research agenda analyzes notions of membership and citizenship development within immigrant communities and their connection to political and civic engagement.
García-Castañon grew up primarily in Arizona, though she was born in Mexico and lived in California for the early part of her childhood. She is the oldest child in her family, and the first to graduate from college in the U.S. She has worked in radio and public relations and held positions as a teaching program coordinator and researcher.
Jesse Garnier
Jesse Garnier, a familiar face in the Journalism Department for many years, is now an assistant professor there. He has taught multimedia and online journalism at SF State since 1998 and served as a professional-in-residence last year. As a Journalism student, he was editor of the Golden Gater newspaper in 1998.
Off campus, Garnier has directed multimedia and online editorial staff in New York for the Associated Press, and in San Francisco for both the Chronicle and Examiner. Since 1997, Garnier has designed and programmed websites for news organizations and community groups, including a bilingual multimedia site for San Francisco and Mission District-based El Tecolote.
A San Francisco native, Garnier is a member of the Online News Association and Asian American Journalists Association.
Javon Johnson
Javon Johnson, Communication Studies, is a noted slam poet who has appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, BET’s Lyric Cafe and TV One’s Verses and Flow. He is a back-to-back national poetry-slam champion.
Johnson has written for Our Weekly and Text and Performance Quarterly and is working on a full-length manuscript about slam and spoken-word poetry communities in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. He co-wrote narration for the documentary Crossover and was a featured performer at the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Festival. He received his Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University and was most recently the Visions and Voices Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Southern California.
ZZ Packer
ZZ Packer, Creative Writing, was featured in The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction issue in 2010 and has received an American Academy in Berlin Prize to complete her upcoming novel, The Thousands.
In 2005, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. Packer earned her Master of Arts from Johns Hopkins University Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University from 1999 to 2001.
“Faculty and students felt that ZZ Packer could bring fresh insights to our program with her interests in narratology, the shape and structure of fiction and her exceptional writing, which has been exhibited in her book of stories, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, an international bestseller,” Creative Writing Department Chair Maxine Chernoff says.
Evren Savcı
Evren Savcı, Women and Gender Studies, completed her Ph.D. at University of Southern California in sociology and gender studies in 2011. She arrives at SF State after a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). Her areas of interest include gender; sexualities; queer, feminist and social theory; globalization and transnationality; cultural sociology and epistemology.
Her book project Queer in Translation: Paradoxes of Westernization and Sexual Others in the Turkish Nation traces the travel and translation of Western concepts that surround discourses on non-normative genders and sexualities such as gender identity, sexual orientation, hate crimes and LGBT rights to the context of contemporary Turkey.
Over the summer she wrote an in-depth opinion piece for The Feminist Wire on her perspectives of the Turkish uprisings, coalition building and coexistence. “The physical contact and co-existence made possible at Taksim Gezi Park between different groups, where Turks and Kurds, Sunnis and Alevis, pious Muslims and atheists, queers and straights together demand a non-autocratic and non-authoritarian government, seems to be changing minds and hearts,” Savcı wrote.
Summer Star
Summer Star, English Language and Literature, researches Victorian poetry, formal poetics and ethical theory. She is finishing a manuscript titled Reflexive Minds, Phenomenal Bodies: The Birth of Aesthetic Experience in Mid Victorian Literature and serves as co-editor of the Victorian section of Oxford’s Year’s Work in English Studies. Star has published articles on Jane Austen, Gerard Manley Hopkin and George Eliot, and has a special interest in developing new approaches to teaching formal poetry and meter.
Star teaches courses in Victorian poetry and the novel. She earned her doctorate from University of California, Santa Barbara.
Johnny Symons
Johnny Symons, Cinema, is an Emmy-nominated independent documentary maker. He has a 20-year track record of directing and producing award-winning films including Daddy and Papa,Beyond Conception and Ask Not. The latter, an exploration of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, screened nationally on PBS and garnered Symons an invitation to the White House to attend President Obama’s signing ceremony when the policy was repealed.
His work has screened at more than 200 international film festivals and is used by hundreds of college educators and community organizers to build awareness of LGBT issues.
Laura Wayth
An assistant professor of Theatre Arts, Laura Wayth has taught and coached acting, voice and musical theatre at Tufts University, College of the Holycross, University of Miami, University of Wisconsin, Eau-Claire, and Florida Atlantic University.
She was a 2002–03 Fulbright fellow to Moscow and a 2011 Senior Fulbright Scholar to Romania. She has worked internationally as a teacher and coach in Italy, Morocco, China and at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Wayth earned her Master of Fine Arts from Harvard University and the Moscow Art Theatre School Institute.
Photo credits
- Michael Arcega courtesy of Michael Arcega
- Dennis Campbell courtesy of the History Department
- Christopher Clemens courtesy of Christopher Clemens
- Marcela García-Castañon courtesy of Marcela García-Castañon
- Jesse Garnier by Gil Riego
- Javon Johnson courtesy of Button Poetry
- ZZ Packer by Eastern Connecticut State University
- Evren Savci by Kimberly Peirce
- Summer Star courtesy of Summer Star
- Johnny Symons courtesy of Johnny Symons
- Laura Wayth by Leo J. Arbeznik